The Sojourner-2
The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 作者：卡森·麦卡勒斯 投票推荐 加入书签 留言反馈
百度搜索 The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 天涯 或 The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
"I just had this day in town. I came home uedly. You see, Papa died last week.""Papa Ferris is dead?"
"Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Geia."
"Oh, Im so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people."
The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mothers face. He asked, "Who is dead?"
Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his fathers death. He saw agaistretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakeo Elizabeths calm voice.
"Mr. Ferris father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didnt know."
"But why did you call him Papa Ferris?"
Bailey and Elizabeth exged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. "A long time ago," he said, "your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born -- a long time ago."
"Mr. Ferris?"
The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris eyes, as he returhe gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it irue that at oime he had called this stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and -- finally -- endure<samp></samp>d in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destru of the fabriarried love.
Bailey said to the children, "Its somebodys supper-time. e on now."
"But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris -- I --"
Billys everlasting eyes -- perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility -- reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine -- a boy of seven with a shadowed little fad knobby knees whom Ferris avoided and usually fot.
"Quick march!" Bailey gently turned Billy toward the door. "Say good night now, son."
"Good night, Mr. Ferris." He added resentfully, "I thought I was staying up for the cake."
"You e in afterward for the cake," Elizabeth said. "Run along now with Daddy for your supper."
Ferris and Elizabeth were alohe weight of the situation desded on those first moments of silence. Ferris asked permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker oable at his side. He looked at the grand piano and noticed the musi the rack.
"Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?"
"I still enjoy it."
"Please play, Elizabeth."
Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readio perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.
She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridest as a prism in a m room. The first voice of the fugue, an annou pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a sed voice, and agaied within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with tless in<cite></cite>genuities -- now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a sihing that does not fear surreo the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insisten the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair bad closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.
"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris --" A door was closed.
The piano began again -- what was this musiplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of aime, another place -- it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, flicts, ambivalent desires. Strahat the music, catalyst>９９lｉｂ.</a> for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and dear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.
"Miz Bailey, dinner is out oable now."
Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.
"Limprovisation de la vie humaine," he said. "Theres nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of humaence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
"Address book?" repeated Bailey. Theopped, nonittal and polite.
"Youre still the same old boy, Johnny," Elizabeth said with a trace of the old tenderness.
It was a Southern dihat evening, and the dishes were his old favorites. They had fried chi and pudding and rich, glazed died sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a versatiohe silences were . And it came about that Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.
"I first knew Jeannine last autumn -- about this time of the year -- in Italy. Shes a singer and she had an e in Rome. I expect we will be married soon."
The words seemed so true, iable, that Ferris did not at first aowledge to himself the lie. He and Jeannine had never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married -- to a White Russian moneyger in Paris from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the lie. Already Elizabeth was saying: "This really makes me glad to know. gratulations, Johnny."
He tried to make amends with truth. "The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy and blossoming." He added, "Jeannine has a little boy of six. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries sometimes."
A lie again. He had taken the boy oo the gardens. The sallow fn child in shorts that bared his spindly legs had sailed his boat in the crete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wao go in to the puppet show. But there was not time, for Ferris had an e at the Scribe Hotel. He had promised they would go to the guignol another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.
There was a stir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink dles. The childreered in their night clothes. Ferris still did not uand.
"Happy birthday, John," Elizabeth said. "Blow out the dles."
Ferris reized his birthday date. The dles blew out lingeringly and there was the smell of burning wax. Ferris was thirty-eight years old. The veins in his temples darkened and pulsed visibly.
"Its time you started for the theater."
Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-byes. The whole family saw him to the door.
A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the noal city with the deliberate attentiveness of departure and perhaps farewell. He was alone. He longe９9lib?d for flighttime and the ing journey.
The day he looked down oy from the air, burnished in sunlight, toylike, precise. Then America was left behind and there was only the Atlantid the distant European shore. The o was milky pale and placid beh the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Toward dark he was thinking of Elizabeth and the visit of the previous evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy and inexplicable regret. He sought the melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The ce, some ued tones, were all that remaihe melody itself evaded him. He had found ihe first voice of the fugue that Elizabeth had played -- it came to him, ied mogly and in a minor key. Suspended above the o the aies of transiend solitude no loroubled him ahought of his fathers death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached the shore of France.
At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist wreathed the lights of the Place de la corde. The midnight bistros gleamed o pavements. As always after a transo flight the ge of tis was too sudden. New York at m, this midnight Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always.
"Vite! Vite!" he called in terror. "Dépêchez-vous."
Valentin opehe door to him. The little boy wore pajamas and an outgrown red robe. His grey eyes were shadowed and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily.
"Jattends Maman."
Jeannine was singing in a night dub. She would not be home before another hour. Valentiuro a drawing, squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the drawing -- it was a banjo player with notes and wavy lines inside a ic-strip balloon.
"We will go again to the Tuileries."
The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his khe melody, the unfinished music that Elizabeth had played, came to him suddenly. Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned -- this time bringing only reition and sudden joy.
"Monsieur Jean," the child said, "did you see him?"
fused, Ferris thought only of another child -- the freckled, family-loved boy. "See who, Valentin?"
"Your dead papa in Geia." The child added, "Was he okay?"
Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: "We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony and we will go into the guignol. We will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more."
"Monsieur Jean," Valentin said. "The guignol is now closed."
Again, the terror the aowledgment of wasted years ah. Valentin, responsive and fident, still led i<u>藏书网</u>n his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek ahe brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close -- as though aion as protean as his love could domihe pulse of time.
百度搜索 The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 天涯 或 The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.